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Comment by shantly | Hacker News Reader

Working for a living is kinda a give-away. In a Fussellian socialized-class sense most tech folks probably come from upper-prole, middle, and upper-middle backgrounds, and the values of the tech crowd itself—the ones it tends to imprint on new members—are largely upper-middle.

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> Working for a living is kinda a give-away.

Actually the giveaway is making over $35,000 a month.

If you can pay someone $35K a month and still make the payments on your 2nd Ranch home, you're probably upper class.

I always thought about it by the distinction between can pay others or not.

> The upper class in modern societies is the social class composed of people who hold the highest social status, usually are the wealthiest members of society, and wield the greatest political power.

(Wikipedia, naturally)

If you just mean high income when you write upper-class, you’re not communicating clearly.

The post we are all commenting on has the words one percent in the title.

> > And there's plenty of "one-percenters" that aren't part of the upper class, most notably tech workers.

> You’re going to have to back that assertion up.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. That's 420,000/y. That's no ordinary tech worker, or even most extraordinary ones. You're a C-suite executive if you're making that kind of money, even in a ridiculous CoL area like SF.

L6 at Google pays $490,000 a year [0] and 90+ percent of first layer managers at GAFAM are L6 or above. While getting into GAFAM and becoming a manager isn't a stroll in the park, it definitely doesn't require you to be extraordinary.

[0]: https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/

> it definitely doesn't require you to be extraordinary

Yes, it does.

Being in the top 1% is extraordinary. It’s a tautology, it’s not really arguable.

In the metric of income in relation to the entire US population, sure. In regards to the ordinary tech worker in a ridiculous CoL area like SF, no it definitely does not require you to be extraordinary to join one of the higher paying companies and work your way into management.

You are correct that in a group of extraordinary people it is more common to find extraordinary people.

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